Olfactory Characterization of Typical Odorous Pollutants Part I: Relationship Between the Hedonic Tone and Odor Concentration
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
One final suggestion: in line 181, I would suggest the change to "some people find this pleasant and some people find this unpleasant" from feeling pleasant or unpleasant.
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
Thank you very much for your evaluation and comments on our paper. We have modified this sentence as your advice.You can find it in Line 207-208. If you have any questions about this paper, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Sincerely yours,
Jiayin Li, Kehua Zou, Weifang Li.
Reviewer 2 Report
Please see attached file for review comments.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
Thank you very much for your letter and the comments about our paper. We have checked the manuscript carefully and revised it according to your advice. We submit here the revised manuscript as well as a list of changes. You can find it in the attachment. If you have any questions, please contact us without hesitate.
Sincerely yours,
Jiayin Li, Kehua Zou, Weifang Li.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors describe the relationships between odor concentration (OC) and hedonic tone for 3 chemicals by a sensory panel with 16 people. This experimental designing is very interesting. However, the scientific relevance is not direct and solid, and the some experiments should be carried in detail. The sensory evaluation of the personnel needs to be pre-made for normalized evaluation (scoring) by a routine training, and the background information of the personnel should also be characterized in age, gender, and ethnicity. I don't think the experimental data is too small to achieve statistically significant differences, in Fig.1 and Fig.3. This is an important issue that should be improved in this manuscript. Therefore, the results and discussion in this draft are too poor to demonstrate the scientific novelty.
Line 126, C’=lgC; C’=log C
In my point, the authors should expand more variables of concentration, personnel, and odor to explore the sensory relationship.
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
Thank you very much for your evaluation and comments on our paper. We have studied reviewer’ s comments carefully and tried our best to made revision in the paper. We submit here the revised manuscript as well as a list of changes. You can find it in the attachment. If you have any question about this paper, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Sincerely yours,
Jiayin Li, Kehua Zou, Weifang Li.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Thanks to the authors for responding carefully, the materials are much clearer. However, the results of this current paper are still few and not enough. The authors should promote the contributions and re-structure their writing for a scientific study.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for giving us an opportunity to revise our manuscript.We have tried our best to improve the sections of "Result" and "Discussion".You can find it in the latest version of manuscript.
Thanks again for your supporting and help. We look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely yours, Jiayin Li, Kehua Zou, Weifang Li
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 3 Report
In Table 5, the quality of the measured data is not good. The measurement uncertainties are lack? How many well-trained testers in each group? Males have twice the critical point of Dimethyl disulfide (threshold conc.) compared to female testers, although the difference of logarithm concentration becomes small.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
We have studied comments carefully. According to the reviewer's suggestion and question, we have made some changes and explanations, which are detailed below:
Point 1:In Table 5, the quality of the measured data is not good. The measurement uncertainties are lack?
Response 1 : We’re very sorry for our negligence. We have added the standard deviation(SD), 95% confidence interval (95% CI), and the coefficient of variation (CV) to reflect the uncertainties of the measurements. You can find it in Table 5.
Point 2: How many well-trained testers in each group?
Response 2: The testers are all the qualified sniffers who have been well-trained by the method mentioned in Section 2.4.
Point 3: Males have twice the critical point of Dimethyl disulfide (threshold conc.) compared to female testers, although the difference of logarithm concentration becomes small.
Response 3: Although the olfactory test method mentioned in the article is widely used all over the world, it has drawbacks. Since the human olfactive sensation is not as stable and accurate as the instrument, the test data generally have large deviation. The scale of odor concentration can be very large, the minimum value can less than 10, and the maximum value can exceed 10,000,000. But the human nose couldn’t experience such a large span. For example, the odor concentration of 3000 and 4000, the actual feelings brought to people are very close. According to the Weber-Fecher law, the human sense of smell is proportional to the logarithm of stimulus quantity of the odorants. After 3000 and 4000 are converted to 3.5 and 3.6, the values are more consist with the actual feelings of the human being. The critical points in this paper are theoretical calculation values. For Dimethyl disulfide, the critical point of male is twice as much as female, but the difference in actual feelings between male and female is not so big.
Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestion.
Sincerely,
Jiayin Li, Kehua Zou, Weifang Li
